Does anyone know if we are facing similar ecological collapse on land?
48% of bird species in decline: https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2022/05/global-bird-populat...
among other examples. In 2018 it was estimated by the WWF that 60% of the animal population was lost between 1970 and 2014: https://www.wwf.org.uk/updates/living-planet-report-2018
This is a BS statistic meant to shock and inappropriately counts the entire area of wilderness that might be used for grazing which is just wilderness that would have supported similar animals anyway.
Even grazing land rarely looks anything like it does before we've shaped it for our use. And even when it does, at first glance, it gets a monoculture of animals, instead. Farmers are not keen on seeing their herds deal with competition or predation from the wild.
That doesn't seem right. According to the FAO (United Nations), only 1.3 billion hectares of land are arable while nearly 5 billion hectares are used for agriculture. That's more like ~25%. And the latter figure only accounts for 38% of the world's land area, so the earlier half figure claim doesn't seem right either.
I suppose if the margin of error on those approximations is exceptionally large...
0.06 Gt C human biomass
0.1 Gt C livestock biomass
0.007 Gt C wild mammal biomass
0.002 Gt C wild bird biomass
[1]: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1711842115
[2]: https://github.com/milo-lab/biomass_distribution/blob/master...
Most of the worlds land megafauna are gone because big slow things are really easy to kill for groups of primitive humans with pointy sticks.
>In 1800, it was estimated there were forty million bison, by 1883, there were few wild bison in the United States - most were in Yellowstone National Park. By 1900, there were less than a thousand left in North America.